Easter Sunday

Easter Sunday (April 8, 2012)

There is a Catholic tradition where every Easter Sunday at 4 o clock in the morning, the statue of Jesus Christ meets the statue of the Mother Mary, literally a re-enactment of the said meeting in the bible.  After which a dawn mass follows.  I had attended such a dawn mass in my youth and it is quite a treat to expose my three children to such a tradition.  This morning is the first time that we as a family attended the “salubong”.

Philosophically, the premise of the Christian belief is based on resurrection.  If there is no resurrection, everything is bogus.  The entire Christian tenet revolves around the resurrection of Jesus Christ because without it, everything is a lie.

The question now is “how do we know that Jesus Christ really did arise from death?”  Do we take it on blind faith or do we reason out the likelihood of resurrection actually happening?  For the ignorant, blind faith is sufficient but for the rational mind, a little more than blind faith is needed to sustain a questioning psyche.

Psychologically, while a person could live a life based on a lie – a person will never die for a lie.  The entire original disciple of Jesus Christ died violent deaths; in fact, most of them were tortured just so they would renounce the resurrection of Christ.  Surprisingly, all of them willingly died for their testament that there was such a thing as a Jesus Christ resurrection.

From the history of violent deaths (the disciples and early Christians), it is safe to assume that the testament of resurrection was more than blind faith but rather an actuality.

Now, how do we make this story of resurrection relevant today?  Tradition will only take you up to a certain distance.  Psychology and History is the purview of an inquiring mind which to my assessment does not appeal to the masses.

Maybe the collective thrust of tradition, psychology and history will carry the day.  Because this current fixation on tradition produces a bigot which is no different from the bigot raised by the terrorists.  A sound psychology with a solid history will carry and sustain the day for the modern day rational mind.

It is just too bad, that the Roman Catholic Church is fumbling this opportunity of raising and producing rational minds.  I suspect that they want drones that blindly follow whatever dictates they issue, they seem to be allergic to a mind that independently thinks. A person who thinks is a person who asks questions.  An entity with a question is the biggest threat to tradition and religion hence the non-encouragement of a questioning mind.

The collective unconscious is lazy; it doesn’t like the actual exercise of thinking.  It would even prefer a mass hysteria as opposed to a single thinking mind.  And that is the sin that the current Roman Catholic Church will have to answer for.  Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who is a heavyweight theologian/philosopher ought to do something about this sin of omission.